Such freedom is not associated with any ethical principles or, indeed, with any of the formal virtues just mentioned, but consists simply in the "firmness" (Festigkeit) of character (Aesthetics, 1: 577; PKÄ, 145 6).
No one in the group seemed to question the chairman's authority, and I, too, in the course of the meeting, came to be powerfully impressed by the strength and firmness of his character, although I would have been hard put to it to say how he communicated these traits, for he never raised his voice and most of the time a mild, kindly smile lingered on his moon-shaped face.
A person with the acute fever of sobriety or recovery comes to have a firmness of mind and character.
The carriage of his head, the focus of his address to other characters, the firmness of his phrasing all give the drama real seriousness; and he's a superb partner.
The reviewer in The Times commented on his sensitiveness, strength and firmness, and called his performance "work of genuine distinction, not only in its grasp of character, but in its control of language".
A Jefferson hand wrote that Adams was a "hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensitivity of a woman".
Jefferson in turn hired a surrogate to say of John Quincy Adams that he was a "hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman".
In the election of 1800, Thomas Jefferson supporters accused John Adams of having a "hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman," while Adams' team distributed a pamphlet calling Jefferson "a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father".
In this period, Adams designated Jefferson as "the son of a half-breed Indian squaw," while Jefferson responded that Adams was "a "hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman".
But the firmness of those religious instructions is an illusion.
